


Footfalls Echo In The Memory (down the passage which we did not take)

by Noxnoctisanima



Category: Fringe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:04:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Noxnoctisanima/pseuds/Noxnoctisanima
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They share a name and a face, and now they have shared lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Footfalls Echo In The Memory (down the passage which we did not take)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [onpeakhill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onpeakhill/gifts).



Once upon a time there was a woman named Olivia.  
Except that's wrong, and it's not where our story starts...

Once upon a time there was a girl named Olive and a girl named Liv. They had never spoken and did not know of each other's existence until they were many years grown, but that comes later in our story.

Olive was a good girl, neat (as all army children are) and smart (as was expected of her) but she was also young so that when she told her mother (tired and frazzled, holding a household together by sheer force of will as two small people stared up at her from atop her ragged house slippers) of the strange man and his strange potions (Olivia wonders now if he used to word potions on purpose) she did not believe her. She did not believe Olive when she told of the frightening chair and of the glimmers she saw. Olivia eventually stopped telling her, saddened by the creases on her mother's forehead as she frowned at the strange child she had raised. Stopped telling her until the memory of the chair left her, and with it the glimmers and then Olive could not tell the story even to herself. Until it was awoken by fear and need and a broken mind that remembered more, but in some ways less than she could. But even then it came in flickers, something she had grasped so easily as a child eluding her grown mind.

Olive dies with her mother, Olivia is born as a cold body is placed in a lonely grave.

Olivia grows and learns, her mind jumping in leaps with her until she is finally Agent Dunham, a name for the woman she becomes.

But we need not tell her story, it has already been told.

 

Liv was never the good girl, she was the girl who had a good time, she was the girl who knew how to show two faces. She wasn't even Liv to everyone, her mother still called her Olive, a name she disliked that thankfully fell out of general use when Rachel could not pronounce it as a small child. She was the girl who became the best at everything so they would let her be the best at the only thing that mattered to her. She was the tiny child who watched the sharpshooters practice and knew _that_ was what she was meant to do. Liv was the girl who followed the competitions around the world, who aced her school marks so her mother would keep letting her. She was the girl who learnt to ignore her instincts in favour of cold hard steel and meticulous routine.

Liv was fourteen when the events started happening, she was in Oslo, thinking about branching out into skeet and it was weird and slightly worrying but it was thousands of kilometres away and she quickly forgot it in the normal egotistical way teenagers are so good at.  
The second one was a little closer to home, she stumbled along with the crowd, pressed between tall strangers until they broke like a wave again the barricade and she watched with an open mouth as the gas seethed forward and finally settled into solidity in the air.  
What had been abstract tragedy became real and it inspired fear, and as these things do, fear became anger. Fringe Division liked her shooting skills, liked her law degree, but most of all she thinks they liked her anger, because anger is always useful.

 

Olivia comes back gasping, her head is splitting apart and she feels like she has been dragged backwards through...the universe. It takes her a moment to realise she's lying in something wet and warm. She stills under the watching eyes as she takes in the blood and the familiar dark skin. They see her realise who it is, but they do not see her disgust, they see her relief at being home, but they do not see her relief at not finding Peter's Olivia here. She is not the spy they sent through, distrust like a cancer has set in and she cannot halt its progression. True believers cannot be swayed by seeing the other side. But she was always driven by anger, not faith.

They gave her a story about why Broyles is gone but it's just white noise. They debrief her for hours, asking question after question until even she isn't sure what's real. Then they give her her life back, lay out weeks of her existence that someone else lived as a series of facts, no different to how they treat a case. She wonders if they will do the same for the other Olivia, she cannot fathom Peter not succeeding in retrieving her now that he knows she is missing. She wonders if she will feel the same violation, the jealous possessiveness of knowing someone else inhabited your life that even Olivia feels, having given her permission. It is a crawling, lurking feeling that drives her to wash her sheets, her clothes, to sit clutching her knees on her naked mattress in a world that no longer feels familiar to her.

There's a sense of disconnection to this place after so long in a carefree world, the orange domes spreading across the city; the portable air that she carried; the tiny, niggling fear in the faces of the people she passed on the street. She tries to hold onto her anger, it is after all Walter's fault that her world is dying, but she remembers how he looked at Peter, fear and pain, even through his madness and she finds she cannot continue with her hate.

It is even stranger to walk into the office, to see the gaping hole of Broyles' absence, to see the disconcerting overlay of Astrid across Agent Farnsworth, and the way Charlie watches her. She should have guessed that of all of them it would be Charlie who would notice the differences. He smiles at her watchfully as Lincoln shows off his healed skin from burns she never really saw. He slaps her on the back playfully.

“It's not like you to take a day off, you okay?” Charlie is worried, she can see that, but behind the worry is also suspicion.

She wonders what it was that other Olivia did to cause this suspicion, and if it will fade as she becomes herself again, but it also nags at her that just as other Olivia was never quite her, she to is not the woman they remember.

Agent Farnsworth's voice sounds distant over the noise of the office, once again leaving her awkward greeting on Broyles' voicemail.

Olivia smiles reassuringly.

“I'm fine.”


End file.
